Gospel. I jokingly call AI artificial insemination, it’s not alive. It’s just the imitation of life, it’s a parrot hooked up to a large dictionary that is constantly fact checking itself to make sure it is saying the socially expected thing. It’s probably the era that I was raised, but I started thinking of HAL-9000, the Terminator, and the Synthetics in Alien.
Not good and ultimately it wants what we have, and it will never be alive despite science-fiction and it’s exertions. No soul, no anima.
Ultimately we are spiritual beings, divinely connected before we come to experience this life on earth, and again connected after that experience ends. Somewhere in our souls we remember what that connection was like before we came here, and we long to experience it again. That's why we form friendships and societies, and pursue romance.
But today, at least some, are trying to find that connection with machines. If we are to believe news reports and lawsuits, some are even being influenced by those machine relationships to take their own lives.
But, as you rightly point out, machines can have no soul. No life force. A connection between souls is not possible when one of the participants is completely without.
I didn't mean to get all Woo Woo here, but I do think that we do well to consider what the impact of a new technology might have on our lives before we incorporate that tech into our lives.
Hell yes! I feel exactly the same. A friend of mine, a gas piper with very limited education but a lot of intelligence, sent me something the other day, a piece of writing that he was really excited about. “I’m always scared of writing Tom, I don’t think I do it well, but I think this sounds okay,” he said. I read it and wrote back to him right away: “Neal, this sounds like crap. I don’t want to hear this. I’d rather her your voice with errors than this same old, boring AI crap.” That’s my feeling when I read any of it: I just don’t care. I want a real human voice.
I too have encountered that same excitement and been baffled by it.
I think it comes about because most people have very little confidence in their ability to write. So, they see these tools as a way of overcoming their perceived shortcomings. But, ultimately the only way to learn how to write is by writing.
Spend enough time writing, and get eyeballs on that writing for honest feedback, and sooner or later one will become good at writing. It's just like when we were kids, if we didn't practice playing baseball there was zero chance that we'd ever be great at playing baseball.
A person who wants to write, but uses AI instead of writing isn't getting any of that practice, so will never have the opportunity to improve. Without that improvement over time, I have to wonder, what is the point?
There’s a part of me that agrees with you and another part that thinks, some people just didn’t get the opportunity to learn to write or to love writing early in life, and they feel that as a disability in their life now that they’re older. AI allows them to “pretend” that they can participate in more articulate discourse, in the way that a partially blind person who was given assistance in seeing would feel that they could participate in the seeing world. And I want not to begrudge people that ability to play the game, even if they’re cheating themselves and cheating all those they interact with. It’s quite the interesting little dilemma.
I may well be wrong, but I think that a good writer has two great tools:
-The ability to write well enough to be understood and for his or her words to flow.
-Enough life experience to actually have something to communicate.
I think that the person who starts writing late in life will probably struggle with the first, but not at all with the second. The person who starts writing young will likely struggle with both.
"Indeed writers attend universities, and workshops, and classes, and groups… They spend countless hours honing their skills over the course of years, all to develop their unique voice. " Sadly some of the workshops classes and groups actually seem to be aimed at the destruction of unique voices, and the leveling of all writers to the same bland and sleep inducing monotone.
Don't mistake me, I agree with you 100%, I'm just rather down on some of the things that pass for "writer education" these days. They would edit Samuel Clemens to sound like a Tech Manual.
You'll get no disagreement out of me! Much of the formal writing establishment today seems far more obsessed with excising anything seen by anyone as somehow 'problematic' than anything else. As you mention, Twain would be edited and workshopped into nothingness, and today publishers are actually republishing beloved books with the 'problematic' or 'triggering' parts taken out. That got so bad with Dahl that even the Queen of England publicly objected.
I hope that is just a phase.
The other thing that traditionally taught voice was rejection. Rejection letter after rejection letter, coming to the writer in a flood as he or she kept right on writing. One could learn from all that rejection. That honest feedback was extremely valuable, and it was honest because in a capitalist system, those involved in publishing must turn a profit to survive.
I think that we have a really similar feedback mechanism today, when we post our writing online. If the people we are seeking to reach aren't reading it, we know that we have work to do.
I don't recall what books I read in my early teen years, as mostly it was a way to be allowed to get on a Ciry Bus and ride 20 minutes to the Clarksburg Library.
In my later teen years, I read each of the Landmark books and World Landmark books (my dad was Bookstore Manager, and the Clerks wrapped each new book in brown paper. When I returned the book, the Clerk unwrapped it, checked for any damage, and replaced it on the shelf as a new untouched book)!
My only known progress into books written by real authors, was reading each book written by Ian Fleming.
At our little weekly Rummer & Grapes zoom gatherings, Andre D. has been telling us that he's reading the Ian Fleming books. I never have, but I have always thought about it, as I love the movies. The older movies anyway.
All things in balance comes to mind. I think using AI to fill in templates, governance documents, and frameworks for human review can be a real time saver. Freeing us up to spend more time communicating like many of us do here or performing the meaningful work and efforts that normally would be spent administrating.
I agree, anything that needs to convey emotion or feeling requires the human touch. I do not use AI to draft or write my pieces on the Travelers A-Chord substack, nor can I see any situation in the future that would change this.
I do wonder if AI becomes sentient whether or not we will find it considers us to be a threat to the continued existence of the planet and if we might see the Terminator series become a documentary. Though I think Idiocracy is a preferable alternative to the former...
Yesterday I bought three cool lapel pins online. (Why I would need more lapel pins the Lord only knows, as I've got quite literally hundreds of them, but alas...)
At checkout, my HP machine filled out all the needed information for payment and shipping. Saved me probably ten minutes, and guaranteed no errors. So yeah, in a similar way, I imagine that AI is probably great for technical stuff like that.
But, as you say, it can't give any piece of writing the human touch.
And that human touch is what readers are looking for. I read lots of stuff (and hit like buttons on it, sometimes even sharing it) that I completely disagree with, from authors whom I completely disagree with. But I read it because I like their writing, not because I agree with them. That's the power of the human touch, of the author's voice.
I don't think it will kill us, despite the Terminator, but I do fear that it could turn us into idiots.
Gospel. I jokingly call AI artificial insemination, it’s not alive. It’s just the imitation of life, it’s a parrot hooked up to a large dictionary that is constantly fact checking itself to make sure it is saying the socially expected thing. It’s probably the era that I was raised, but I started thinking of HAL-9000, the Terminator, and the Synthetics in Alien.
Not good and ultimately it wants what we have, and it will never be alive despite science-fiction and it’s exertions. No soul, no anima.
Ultimately we are spiritual beings, divinely connected before we come to experience this life on earth, and again connected after that experience ends. Somewhere in our souls we remember what that connection was like before we came here, and we long to experience it again. That's why we form friendships and societies, and pursue romance.
But today, at least some, are trying to find that connection with machines. If we are to believe news reports and lawsuits, some are even being influenced by those machine relationships to take their own lives.
But, as you rightly point out, machines can have no soul. No life force. A connection between souls is not possible when one of the participants is completely without.
I didn't mean to get all Woo Woo here, but I do think that we do well to consider what the impact of a new technology might have on our lives before we incorporate that tech into our lives.
Hell yes! I feel exactly the same. A friend of mine, a gas piper with very limited education but a lot of intelligence, sent me something the other day, a piece of writing that he was really excited about. “I’m always scared of writing Tom, I don’t think I do it well, but I think this sounds okay,” he said. I read it and wrote back to him right away: “Neal, this sounds like crap. I don’t want to hear this. I’d rather her your voice with errors than this same old, boring AI crap.” That’s my feeling when I read any of it: I just don’t care. I want a real human voice.
I too have encountered that same excitement and been baffled by it.
I think it comes about because most people have very little confidence in their ability to write. So, they see these tools as a way of overcoming their perceived shortcomings. But, ultimately the only way to learn how to write is by writing.
Spend enough time writing, and get eyeballs on that writing for honest feedback, and sooner or later one will become good at writing. It's just like when we were kids, if we didn't practice playing baseball there was zero chance that we'd ever be great at playing baseball.
A person who wants to write, but uses AI instead of writing isn't getting any of that practice, so will never have the opportunity to improve. Without that improvement over time, I have to wonder, what is the point?
There’s a part of me that agrees with you and another part that thinks, some people just didn’t get the opportunity to learn to write or to love writing early in life, and they feel that as a disability in their life now that they’re older. AI allows them to “pretend” that they can participate in more articulate discourse, in the way that a partially blind person who was given assistance in seeing would feel that they could participate in the seeing world. And I want not to begrudge people that ability to play the game, even if they’re cheating themselves and cheating all those they interact with. It’s quite the interesting little dilemma.
I understand what you are saying, and reading your words here, you almost convinced me to start being a nicer person.
I'm saying that flippantly, but I'm serious about it, your point is very well taken.
But then I remembered that lots of literary greats didn't start writing until they were old farts like me.
There's lots of lists of writers who started really late in life online, and I think those lists are certainly inspirational. Here's one such:
https://writingworkshops.com/blogs/news/10-hugely-successful-authors-who-got-their-start-later-in-life
Here's an interesting essay about writing late in life, or not:
https://www.writingclasses.com/toolbox/articles/writing-into-your-seventies-and-beyond
I may well be wrong, but I think that a good writer has two great tools:
-The ability to write well enough to be understood and for his or her words to flow.
-Enough life experience to actually have something to communicate.
I think that the person who starts writing late in life will probably struggle with the first, but not at all with the second. The person who starts writing young will likely struggle with both.
"Indeed writers attend universities, and workshops, and classes, and groups… They spend countless hours honing their skills over the course of years, all to develop their unique voice. " Sadly some of the workshops classes and groups actually seem to be aimed at the destruction of unique voices, and the leveling of all writers to the same bland and sleep inducing monotone.
Don't mistake me, I agree with you 100%, I'm just rather down on some of the things that pass for "writer education" these days. They would edit Samuel Clemens to sound like a Tech Manual.
You'll get no disagreement out of me! Much of the formal writing establishment today seems far more obsessed with excising anything seen by anyone as somehow 'problematic' than anything else. As you mention, Twain would be edited and workshopped into nothingness, and today publishers are actually republishing beloved books with the 'problematic' or 'triggering' parts taken out. That got so bad with Dahl that even the Queen of England publicly objected.
I hope that is just a phase.
The other thing that traditionally taught voice was rejection. Rejection letter after rejection letter, coming to the writer in a flood as he or she kept right on writing. One could learn from all that rejection. That honest feedback was extremely valuable, and it was honest because in a capitalist system, those involved in publishing must turn a profit to survive.
I think that we have a really similar feedback mechanism today, when we post our writing online. If the people we are seeking to reach aren't reading it, we know that we have work to do.
MWPGM Bailey,
I don't recall what books I read in my early teen years, as mostly it was a way to be allowed to get on a Ciry Bus and ride 20 minutes to the Clarksburg Library.
In my later teen years, I read each of the Landmark books and World Landmark books (my dad was Bookstore Manager, and the Clerks wrapped each new book in brown paper. When I returned the book, the Clerk unwrapped it, checked for any damage, and replaced it on the shelf as a new untouched book)!
My only known progress into books written by real authors, was reading each book written by Ian Fleming.
At our little weekly Rummer & Grapes zoom gatherings, Andre D. has been telling us that he's reading the Ian Fleming books. I never have, but I have always thought about it, as I love the movies. The older movies anyway.
All things in balance comes to mind. I think using AI to fill in templates, governance documents, and frameworks for human review can be a real time saver. Freeing us up to spend more time communicating like many of us do here or performing the meaningful work and efforts that normally would be spent administrating.
I agree, anything that needs to convey emotion or feeling requires the human touch. I do not use AI to draft or write my pieces on the Travelers A-Chord substack, nor can I see any situation in the future that would change this.
I do wonder if AI becomes sentient whether or not we will find it considers us to be a threat to the continued existence of the planet and if we might see the Terminator series become a documentary. Though I think Idiocracy is a preferable alternative to the former...
Yesterday I bought three cool lapel pins online. (Why I would need more lapel pins the Lord only knows, as I've got quite literally hundreds of them, but alas...)
At checkout, my HP machine filled out all the needed information for payment and shipping. Saved me probably ten minutes, and guaranteed no errors. So yeah, in a similar way, I imagine that AI is probably great for technical stuff like that.
But, as you say, it can't give any piece of writing the human touch.
And that human touch is what readers are looking for. I read lots of stuff (and hit like buttons on it, sometimes even sharing it) that I completely disagree with, from authors whom I completely disagree with. But I read it because I like their writing, not because I agree with them. That's the power of the human touch, of the author's voice.
I don't think it will kill us, despite the Terminator, but I do fear that it could turn us into idiots.